


Maybe these paperbacks are cages...

by Postmortal



Category: The Mechanisms (Band)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Found Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, characters tagged in order of plot relevance, hello it's time for jonny to learn how to read, this is actually really soft I promise
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-15
Updated: 2021-01-15
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:28:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28768596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Postmortal/pseuds/Postmortal
Summary: Functionally speaking, Jonny is illiterate. He's trying his best, truly; perhaps what he really needs is a teacher who won't give up on him if he shoots themmore thana few times in the learning process.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 98





	Maybe these paperbacks are cages...

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [this post](https://shitty-mechs-headcannons.tumblr.com/post/640245874934579200/jonny-is-very-much-so-illiterate-so-right-now-his) for making me write this.
> 
> P.S.: I know the word list towards the end is long, but I promise it's important-
> 
> P.P.S.: The title is from [Wax Cylinder Sonata by Dirt Poor Robins](https://youtu.be/aUfp4pEgUhw)!

There are quite a few things you learn about Jonny when you're also a Mechanism.

  1. He won't ever cry in front of anyone, and if you saw him cry, no you didn't.
  2. He's great at everything, and if you ever saw him make a mistake, no you didn't.
  3. He's perfectly capable of handling his own, thank you very much. Unless he just doesn't want to. In that case, why don't _you_ just do it, or else it won't get done any time soon.



He's a very proud man, and Ivy's always assumed he got that from his father; he's just the kind of bastard that has to be an inherited trait. He's a very proud man, and that's why he said and did everything with the kind of confidence that'd get most people killed (not that he didn't get killed for it constantly, of course). He's a very proud man, and that's why no one needs to know about what he and Ivy get up to when everyone else is just busy enough to not be paying them any mind.

* * *

"You know a lot of languages." Jonny says, presumably from the doorway to the ship's library. Ivy has her back to him, and she doesn't even look up from her book to respond.

"I do."

"And you're fluent in them. Enough to read?"

"I am." Idly, she wonders where this conversation is heading. She runs a few calculations mentally. The chances are quite high that whatever this is, she'll be dead for a while by the end of it. About 93.572 percent, with almost all the rest being that someone else comes by and kills Jonny for some inane reason. There is an extremely small, but still measurable, chance that she will kill Jonny. It's _highly_ unlikely by comparison, though.

"Do you know mine? From New Texas?"

"Yes? It's literally English."

"I meant the writing."

"That- Jonny, that's also English." Unbeknownst to him, she ups the chance of killing him by 0.00000017 percent.

"Are you sure?" Ivy nods. "Well, I don't think so. Tim's English, and we talk _nothing_ alike. Never mind that. D'you have any books from there? I know you take books from every place we go, so..."

"There's a difference between English as in 'from England' and English as in the language. Anyways, I don't have any books from New Texas. Wasn't around when you joined up, remember? 

Jonny ignores the first bit of her response. "Oh. Right."

"What did you need them for anyways? Didn't think you knew how to read."

At least she has the good sense to put her book away before finishing that sentence. No need to get something so fragile unnecessarily bloody, after all.

* * *

Coming back from being dead is draining. As much as people love to compare dying to a long sleep, coming back feels like the equivalent of those nights when you have a bunch of nightmares and manage to wake up feeling more tired than before. When Ivy comes to, she has to spend a few minutes just waiting for her brain to re-download all the information it had previously stored. It's a lot like walking through a hail storm – all the information is coming at you hard and fast, and no amount of shelter is going to stop it from coming down.

Once she's all caught up, she grabs the book she was reading prior. Would've been nice to have finished it before Jonny shot her, but that can't be helped now. She ignores the part of her brain already running calculations on when he'll be back in favour of focusing on her reading. She doesn't need to know when she'll be interrupted again (approximately eighteen and a half minutes) and she doesn't really care, either.

"Are you not going to make fun of me this time, or will I have to shoot you again?" Jonny's in the doorway again, and somehow manages to sound as if _he's_ the one inconvenienced by killing her.

"I wasn't making fun of you. It was a genuine observation. I've never seen you read or write anything for yourself in all the time I've known you. Unless you're signing something, you just find some way to defer to someone else. It's only natural I'd assume you can't read."

Jonny is quiet for a bit. Not long enough, but a bit. "You're right," he says finally. "I don't know how to read."

"They didn't teach you how to read on New Texas?"

"No, or if they did, I never learned it. Should I have?"

"Well, I've always just assumed it just wasn't particularly important on your planet, and that's why you didn't know."

"It wasn't!" Jonny sounds defencive. The conversation isn't a personal attack, but it requires vulnerability, and those two things are one and the same to him. "At least, it wasn't important for me. I don't know if it was like that for everyone else. I don't think the life I had there was... normal."

Ivy shuts her book. Things have _finally_ gotten interesting. Jonny almost never talks about his actual past, only the embellished version he tells on stage. "Go on."

"As far back in my life as I can remember, I was always off doing something for my father. I never really had that much time to myself. Didn't get much of a chance to make friends or anything – not that I would've wanted to, don't go thinking I'm the nice and friendly type. Anyways, like I said, I was always just too busy being his little _accomplice_ to bother with any kind of formal schooling, if we even had any. I honestly don't know how any of that worked back home; it never really applied to me."

"And you never needed to read anything when he sent you out to 'do things for him?'"

"Nah. Everybody knew everybody round where I lived. If he wanted me to take someone out, all he had to do was show me a picture. No one was ever too hard to find."

It's sad, really. Ivy wants to feel bad for him, and maybe some part of her does, but she knows well enough he won't appreciate pity – who does, truly? Instead, she proposes a solution.

"I could teach you to read, if you wanted."

* * *

The problem with teaching Jonny _anything_ is that he tends to set himself up for failure. He wants books as close to what he might've had on New Texas as possible, so Ivy gives him one of the ones Tim likes to read. Something he says was a "classic" back on Earth, whatever that means. Ivy knows he won't be able to read it, no matter how many words she helps him sound out, but he's stubborn and won't take anything more suited to his current reading level.

At some point, he gets frustrated and rips the book in half. Ivy doesn't often kill the other Mechanisms. She's always thought it tedious, and not normally worth all the trouble since they'll just come back to life again later. This, however, had her moving the percentage of probability that she'd kill Jonny all the way up to a full one percent. Not much mathematically, but infinitely worse if the odds weren't in his favour.

Jonny knows he's fucked up, and she knows he knows it. As she turns to leave the room, she hears h apologising quickly. "Shit- Sorry, Ivy. I didn't mean to break your book; I just-"

She doesn't hear the rest. She's already out of the room and headed down the hallway. Not going anywhere in particular, just taking time to cool down. She reminds herself that she's meant to be teaching him, that people often get frustrated when things don't go to plan, that a book can be fixed, or even reprinted if necessary. When she reenters the library, Jonny's attempting to glue the pages back into place. Just enough of them are upside down or backwards for her to find humourous.

"I'll fix that later; don't worry about it. Just don't break my books anymore. It won't make reading easier."

He doesn't meet her eyes, and he sounds rather exasperated when he responds. "Everyone else can read all they want, and I can't even get through one book. It's so dumb."

"But you know _you're_ not, right? Dumb, I mean."

"Compared to the others-"

" _Compared to the others,_ you didn't have the same advantages. They learned when it's easiest, when they were little kids. You didn't start until just recently, and what's it been? A few centuries? A millennium? You're not stupid; you're just at a disadvantage."

"Well, it's a _stupid_ disadvantage."

"Perhaps so. Either way, you won't learn anything beating yourself up." She takes a seat in front of him on the floor. "You don't have to do it all at once, you know. Before I was old enough to learn to read, people read books to me. They'd read pages and then turn the books round so I could all see the pictures. Do funny voices for characters."

"What's that got to do with me, though?"

"Reading to kids encourages literacy in lots of ways. I don't see why it couldn't help adults as well. You can learn the words as you go. I'm not trying to sound patronizing or anything, but you have to start small. Books meant for kids would be helpful here. You have to have something to build off of."

"Well, I haven't got _anything_ to build off of, so..."

"Sure you do." Ivy grabs a notebook and pen from one of the nearby tables. "Let's start with something you recognise. You know how to spell your name, right?"

"Sort of – I just asked Carmilla to show me how to write mine like she did hers. Never told her I couldn't actually _read_ it. Just copied what she did until I could do it myself."

"Then we'll start there."

* * *

She teaches him a lot of things in his first few lessons – the English alphabet, the sounds those letters can make, how to spell his name. He gets frustrated easily, but she finds that the actual reading parts of their lessons seem to calm him. She'd looked around for children's books from Earth, and luckily, she had some in the library.

After the work on spelling and phonics, she spends the last half of each lesson reading to him, occasionally stopping to have him sound out a few words or a couple of sentences. She sits on the floor and he lays next to her, sometimes with his head in her lap. She absently fiddles with one of his chest belts or the straps to his goggles as she reads, and he listens quietly until it's his turn to read something.

She finds he's really taken a liking to some book called The Very Hungry Caterpillar – perhaps due to similar eating habits? – though he always asks why the caterpillar doesn't try to eat other bugs. She never seems to have an answer that satisfies him – "They're not as big as this one looks; caterpillars are tiny." "Well, grow them bigger, then!" – but she's honestly just happy to see he's taken such an interest in reading.

"Hey," Jonny interrupts one day "how come you haven't told the others about all this? I'm sure they'd _love_ to have something else to go at me for."

"Not everything has to be a group affair," Ivy answers simply. Teachers should build a rapport with their students. You can't do that without trust."

"So you really aren't going to use this against me?"

"Nope."

Jonny considers this a moment. He nods as if he's making up his mind on something, and Ivy assumes he's just coming to grips with the concept of Not Being Betrayed By Someone You Trust. Then, "Can we read The Very Hungry Caterpillar again?"

* * *

During some downtime, Ivy makes some letter magnets for him. She makes a few copies of each letter, enough for complex sentences, and puts them in a bin by the door. Each time Jonny comes in for another reading lesson, she has him spell something out for her by putting the magnets up on one of the walls. She tells him he can spell anything he wants, but he has to know how to say the word, too, or it doesn't count. Oddly enough, he doesn't argue any of this, and actually seems to enjoy it – even though it takes a while before he actually spells something correctly.

The first word he learns to spell (other than his own name) is "Ivy." It takes some time – "Why does the letter I make so many sounds?" "Why doesn't it end on the letter V?" – but eventually, he starts to get the hang of things. He seems to have favoured words, even if he doesn't realise it. Ivy keeps a mental log of all the things he spells, how long he takes to get them right, how many times a word is repeated:

  * JONNY
  * IVY
  * TIM
  * GUN
  * STAR
  * SUN
  * DRUM
  * BRIAN
  * LOUD
  * TOYS
  * IVY
  * FRIEND
  * FLUTE
  * SPACE
  * POWDER
  * PLANET
  * HEART
  * ASHES
  * LOUD
  * LIGHT
  * FIRE
  * NASTYA
  * MARIUS (That one takes him a few tries.)
  * VIOLIN
  * FRIEND
  * GUNPOWDER
  * HEART
  * METAL
  * STARS
  * CARMILLA
  * FIGHT
  * SOLDIER
  * DOCTOR
  * FRIENDS
  * BRIAN
  * IVY
  * MECHANISM
  * FAMILY
  * FAMILY
  * FAMILY
  * FAMILY



And one day, just before Jonny leaves after his lesson, he arranges a message with his magnets on the wall:

THANK YOU

**Author's Note:**

> Come yell at me on [Tumblr](https://transcognizi.tumblr.com); it gets lonely in the void.


End file.
